For a while I've been reading I Love
Typography, which describes itself as a means of bringing the subject of
Typography to the masses. I am definitely part of the masses, I know I don't have the
critical eye and patience needed for good page design, as made evident by my site with its
uninspired look, horrible colors, blocky layout, and general failure to render properly in
any browser but Safari. But as I Love Typography says, it is truly inspiring at
times to see these beautiful fonts and what people have done with them. Each article
showcases numerous typefaces and sometimes works of art created with them. It's a
fascinating read on a beautiful topic I now realize I know so little about.

One humorous thing that's stuck with me is the professional typography community's
distaste for Arial. Why hate Arial? As an outsider reading about it, it seems like one
of those things that really only those in the know, know. One detailed explanation can be
found here. About the closest thing
I can compare it to is why do computer hackers generally hate Windows and love Linux--you
really can't explain that to a normal person who uses Windows for normal stuff, and it
generally works just fine. On the surface, the whole Arial thing has to do with it being
a notably poor knockoff of Helvetica, the beloved font of designers everywhere. While it
was created to be a drop-in replacement, certain things about it are subtly different and
look ugly to the trained eye. Compare Arial on the left to Helvetica on the right, and
judge if you think one is better than the other (you might read How to Spot Arial first):

I'd have to agree that Arial's R is indeed, well, rather pointy and unattractive,
like a pirate's peg-leg or something. Since learning about this, it's become fun to try
to spot Arial when used in various everyday places. For example, one of my favorite
magazines, Discover, uses what appears to be
Arial on their web site and on the top of every magazine (the 'R' is the dead giveaway, as
well as the 'C'):

Compare this to what I created in TextEdit with Arial Narrow, it looks like all they did
was squish it together a bit:

It's easy to get carried away. America's Most Fonted:
The 7 Worst Fonts describes several fonts you should never use, including Comic Sans
and Papyrus, which (ack!) I think I had on my wedding invitations.

If nothing else, this shows how easy it is as to make what more trained eyes would see as
a n00b mistake when it comes to design. Hire someone who knows, when it matters.

In the news recently, Firefox 3.5
joins other browsers in supporting
the CSS tag @font-face. Designers can now instruct a visitor's browser
to download and use specific fonts on your page, which seems great, given the otherwise
unpredictable and varied selection that otherwise exists by default. Again, it's highly
browser dependent, but with Firefox now supporting it, there's a good chance a fair
percentage of your audience will benefit. I switched the heading at the top of every
article to use a cool looking font, Graublau Sans Web (freely
licensed), with the following css:

As you can see, it will try to use the new font first, but fall back to how I had it
before: Lucida Grande (on Macs) or Lucida Sans Unicode (on Windows). And it looks like
the following, compare it to what you see:

Comic Sans, a fascinating
documentary about the oft-reviled Comic Sans font. The opening quote from the creator of
Comic Sans, Vincent Connare, is great: "If you love it, you don't know much about
typography. And if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography either and
you should get another hobby."